It does not appear that KaiOS is something that anyone should own.
"The first major commercial adoption of B2G/Firefox OS was seen around 2018 with KaiOS, a widely popular commercial fork of Firefox OS that promised to be a modern OS for inexpensive feature phones. Although KaiOS turned out to be disappointingly closed and oriented to tracking users and shipping advertising, it was quickly forked in GerdaOS, a custom ROM that promised to bring back some of the openness of Firefox OS to KaiOS devices such as newer Nokias, and kill the intrusive user trackers in the process."
I liked the idea of a feature phone you could install apps on. KaiOS wasn't it, it's just a terrible feature phone that isn't actually extensible in any practical way. You can't really write your own apps for it, and it's also not even good at being a traditional feature phone.
Can generally confirm. Not from a "tracking" perspective, but from a "General usability in the modern world" perspective. I spent a year with a KaiOS Flip IV (about a $70 AT&T phone), and finally gave up and went back to a smartphone when the keyboard got so bad I couldn't dial a phone number without massive corrections, much less text.
It felt, first and foremost, like a device built by someone who had been told stories about the phones of the first 5-8 years of the 2000s, but had never seen one, never used one, and wasn't quite sure how it was all supposed to really work. Lots of really weird pain points like predictive text not capitalizing the lone "i" no matter what mode I was in. I started trying to write texts without "I" in them to avoid having to perform the 72 keystroke sequence to capitalize it - I don't like being lazy in texts about things like that.
The performance wasn't bad initially, but it felt like there were some seriously non-optimal data structures involved in everything. A text thread with more than 50 messages or so started being slow to interact with, God help you if it's got more than a few pieces of media in it. And if the phone had too many text messages in general, the whole texting app would lag badly (seconds to open, seconds to see a list of conversations, etc). I had to very aggressively trim old threads, and sometimes even current ones, to try and keep the texting app responsive.
It also got oddly prone to "Oh, yeah! There was a thing I was supposed to notify you about! You're looking at me now, I remember, you got a text! chime" sorts of behaviors I could never run down the cause of. I'd be texting someone, waiting for a reply with the phone closed, and... nothing. Magically, as soon as I opened it 10 minutes later, I'd get the notification that they'd sent a text. I hate to say things like "You have one job," but "Notifying me that there's a phone call or text message" is sort of the core function of a modern phone-type device.
The browser was a joke. I could browse Hacker News and that was about it. Anything more complex would fail to render, or just crash the browser. A modern web capable device it was not.
I think I gave it a fair shake for a year. But I was still doing things like "Carrying an iPhone, powered down, for when I needed something I couldn't do on KaiOS." It was mostly either drone ops or a particular building access app that I needed often enough, so I don't really fault it, but it was annoying not having them on my carry device. Same goes for "literally anything but SMS." Attempts to get a Matrix client on the device didn't go very far (there is one, but it doesn't work very well), Signal was a no-go, and nothing else was useful either.
It did have Bluetooth, though. And I did like being able to cart around music on SD card. Don't carry too much, though, the music app couldn't handle a ton.
I moved to it when Apple decided to push on-device CSAM scanning, and... a year and another OS revision later, they've seemingly not done that. And then iOS 16 added Lockdown, which I decided to play with, determined did everything I wanted in such a feature, and I'm back to an iOS device with very few apps installed. I never had warm fuzzies about the security posture of the KaiOS ecosystem either - Apple, I do generally trust to try to secure their devices. KaiOS, nothing about it really felt robust against a remote attacker, though I've no evidence that it's actually full of holes. It just never gave any real confidence that it was more than a best effort, YOLO'd sort of thing tossed over the fence.
There were some fun little games, but they were all very peppered with advertising. At least you could sideload stuff.
Anyway... it's a thing, I tried it, and despite my exceedingly high tolerance for tech pain, I couldn't make it past a year. Failures on my part, I suppose. I could have probably dismantled it and repaired the keyboard...
>Lots of really weird pain points like predictive text not capitalizing the lone "i" no matter what mode I was in.
My modern Android phone is like this now; it pretty much never capitalizes lone 'i's. In fact, the whole way auto-correct works is completely brain-dead; it's constantly trying to force me to use wrong words and wrong spellings, even when I try to back up and correct it. It's extremely frustrating. And judging by all the errors I see in other peoples' texts, it's not just me.
I've just about given up on autocorrect on phones. iOS, Android, doesn't matter: every single one I've tried is absolute garbage. Much easier and faster to just type everything manually than to rely on autocorrect shortcuts that seem to go out of their way to ignore everything that should be corrected while "correcting" everything that shouldn't be corrected.
My Note 10 has corrected "you" to "U" - I'd seen the word switch before my eyes. Nevermind that it corrects "i" to "U" sometimes as well. And I've never written a text ever with that lazy contraction of "you". It's like the stupid is being forced upon us.
I'm of the opposite mindset. I don't want any text correction to apply any form of capitalization because it indicates to the reader that I am on a mobile device. I type all in lower case on desktop and I want to be able to do the same on phones. Sadly my OnePlus disregards the Android setting to do this (which you may have inadvertently set).
Same here - Samsung or Google keyboards same, they must have secretly agreed on doing this crap. I disabled correction and by looking at the word suggestions I'm positive I will never reenable it. Any usable Android keyboards out there which do also swiping and don't suck all your data?
I'm debating whether I should give up and disable all auto-correction. It does save me time when I fat-finger words, hitting the letters directly adjacent to the ones I intended, but then it wastes me time when it does what I described before.
Honestly, it's been decades now. How hard can it be to make auto-correct not suck? There's so many utterly stupid things it does which should be fixable with a few lines of code. For one, how about not auto-correcting proper names (which you can tell because they're in the middle of a sentence and start with a capital)? And how about making a lone 'i' capital? And how about not auto-correcting at all if the user has backspaced over the auto-correction and fixed it?
> The browser was a joke. I could browse Hacker News and that was about it. Anything more complex would fail to render, or just crash the browser. A modern web capable device it was not.
That's the one thing that surprises me the most in your post. Any idea if it was actual browser engine issues, or running on inadequate hardware?
I believe the device has 512MB RAM and a quad core 1.1GHz A7 - so not exactly rocking the hardware. But the browser engine didn't have things like some basic Javascript support, near as I could tell - Discourse forums wouldn't load properly, grumbling about how I ought to enable Javascript. And on that little CPU and RAM, anything "faintly modern" just wouldn't work right at all.
Not that you can see much, it's a 240x320px screen.
There are some higher end KaiOS devices out there I debated, but spending a couple hundred on that level of functionality just didn't seem a good use of funds to me.
Can confirm, both. KaiOS has tons of bugs and vendors usually ship old buggy versions. But the hardware itself often dies or has flaws, because it's the cheapest phone you can make with modern features (bluetooth, wifi, 4G LTE, a multitasking OS that can "run apps", etc).
The problems I see with KaiOS are 1) lack of aggressive development to fix bugs/features, 2) lack of vendors upgrading the OS on new handsets, 3) lack of vendors upgrading the hardware to run newer versions of the OS. And the market doesn't really care (or have a choice), they just need the cheapest phone possible that can check the weather forecast or email.
Until both developers and vendors give a crap about building efficient technology, they will continue to churn out bloated, buggy software on cheap hardware. Even Palm Pilot was more advanced than the crap churned out today.
Palm didn't have a fully-featured browser but pre-rendered pages server-side (that solution was called "Access" I believe). Palm had nowhere near the power, emulating Thumb/68k instructions on a handheld. FirefoxOS was on to something, and even WASM could maybe provide apps without an app store, but with the incredible web bloat of the last decade we got neither lean nor portable web apps.
>Palm didn't have a fully-featured browser but pre-rendered pages server-side
iirc opera mini browser did something similar. The browser would tunnel all requests through their server and render and optimize the page before sending it back to the browser
That's unfortunate, if no less confusing. Any chance this happened before https://techweez.com/2020/03/11/mozilla-will-support-kaios-i... ? I'm just trying to square the statement that it has a fundamentally broken browser engine with the claim that it's still being supported directly by Mozilla. (Not, to be clear, that I doubt you for a moment.) I wonder if they did something like intentionally disabling features (say, JS) in order to make it fit on the hardware. I mean, ultimately kind of whatever, because I'm hardly going to use a proprietary stack like that anyways, but it's puzzling that browsing is the weak point on a Firefox OS fork.
> predictive text not capitalizing the lone "i" no matter what mode I was in. I started trying to write texts without "I" in them to avoid having to perform the 72 keystroke sequence to capitalize it
Surely hyperbole and off by an order of magnitude...?
I have read some terrible reviews on KaiOS, UI lags and freezes, shipping broken updates, terrible battery drains. I'm sure there are some devices have good versions of KaiOS, but with this track record it's like winning on lottery. SailfishOS from Jolla seems to be a much better alternative for a non-Android non-iOS device that is practically usable.
There's a list on Wikipedia[1], not sure if it's complete; the company behind KaiOS has a list of devices too [2]. Important ones include the JioPhone, which was part of Jio's large push into the mobile market in India. There's also a nostalgic Nokia 8110 4G (Banana Phone); there's even some with modems appropriate for the US market.
Anyone want a Bananaphone? I tried to use it for a while, but AT&T shut down their 3G calling network and it doesn't have the radio for VoLTE, and AT&T isn't doing 4G calling - they jumped straight from 3G to VoLTE. It also doesn't do MMS for group texting. I'm easy enough to find, I can toss the thing in a box. On the plus side, I got a Flip IV out of it. I ran with it for a year or so before the keyboard got so bad I gave up - when you can't dial a phone number without having to correct multi-presses and such, texting is damned near impossible.
Isn't 4G calling and VoLTE the same thing? A 4G phone without VoLTE uses the 3G network when placing/receiving calls, hence why the 3G shutdown is causing pain even though non 4G phones are really rare these days.
I don't believe they're the same thing. I can connect to the 4G data networks with the Banana, but not make calls, and I'm not sure as to the details of why - going deep into cell network reverse engineering wasn't my goal here, I wanted to experiment with the state of non-iOS, non-Android cell phones in post-2020. I got a lot of data, but... well, I'm back to iOS, so I couldn't make it work.
There are KaiOS devices that support VoLTE and work on US carriers, but the Banana doesn't seem to be one of them. In addition to its many other pain points. Those keys suck to hit...
I had similar issues with TMobile. Bought the phone for backcountry use outside of the States, and I sold it on eBay after I got back because it was useless here in the US.
There is no 2G network in the US anymore. Or at least, very little. AT&T shut down theirs in 2017; I thought T-Mobile shut their 2G GSM around then too, but sources say T-Mobile's 2G shutdown is end of year 2022.
Many EU carriers have planned to keep a small amount of 2G for industrial devices, old handsets, etc, but US carriers have not.
